


Flying

by still_lycoris



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-31
Updated: 2014-01-31
Packaged: 2018-01-10 17:38:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1162592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/still_lycoris/pseuds/still_lycoris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The very first time Jenna saw a spaceship, she knew that she wanted one of her own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flying

The very first time Jenna saw a spaceship, she knew that she wanted one of her own.

It was freedom, pure and simple. Oh, perhaps to everybody else, the freighter they’d been looking at her had been an old, battered little thing but to her, all she’d seen was the fact that you could _move_. Go anywhere, do anything, if only you _had_ one.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Jenna,” her mother had said. “You’re not going to be a pilot. It just isn’t going to happen. Pilots are either military or … well. Not our sort.”

Jenna had smiled, nodded and dismissed the comment. She didn’t want to be military, that was true but _not our sort_ didn’t mean anything. She would simply ignore that. One day, she was going to be a pilot.

She put a lot of effort into it. She looked up what you needed. She tried to find out how much a spaceship cost. That was quite difficult. Apparently, most people didn’t own their own spaceships. The people who owned them didn’t _fly_ them. You had to borrow one and work for the people who did and then you had to do what they said. Jenna thought that was disappointing. If she had enough money to buy one, she’d fly it all the time. But she saw no reason to let it deter her. Clearly she needed to earn the money to buy a spaceship by borrowing other people’s and then buy her own and fly it anyway. She’d decide what she wanted to do with it afterwards. That wasn’t the important bit.

The ship was the important bit.

She worked hard at school. She knew what subjects she needed to do, what she needed to focus on and so she did. Some of the maths was hard, the physics more so but she focused, reading and checking until she understood it all. She would get the best marks. She _would_ be a pilot.

Of course, she had to be careful. Get _too_ good and they might conscript you into the military, she really didn’t want that. Freedom was not something she would find in the jackboots of troopers. She needed to fail a few tests, look a bit confused at the right moments. It was okay. She could do that.

And whenever she could, she slipped down to the spaceyards and watched the ships go in and out. The people got to know her rather well, started chatting to her, waving cheerfully when she walked by. Jenna cultivated that. One thing she knew was true was that who you knew mattered.

Her mother still didn’t believe in her. She shook her head whenever Jenna mentioned it, left information around for different jobs that she thought Jenna was better suited for. Jenna ignored them all. She knew what she wanted.

She got the right marks. She got into the flight school she’d hoped for. People around her celebrated, cheered her. Her mother shook her head, muttered that Jenna was throwing her life away – but Jenna found the required uniform on her bed, perfectly size and just a little tailored, the way only her mother could do.

They didn’t do talking. That wasn’t their way. 

The training was sometimes brutal. There was a lot you needed to know about space. About emergency procedures, about the difficulties that could happen. About almost every single spaceship that had ever been used since the dawn of time.

Jenna loved it. She loved every minute of it. It didn’t matter what it was hard. It didn’t matter that sometimes it was boring. It was what she wanted.

A pilot was who she was. Who she would always be. What she had been born to be.

Of course, it was quite boring. She discovered that the minute she got a job. That was the problem when you were working for other people – they told you where to go, you went. But she did it, just the same. It was the plan. Make money. Buy spaceship. If there was some boredom in the middle, that was just how it was.

But it was _very_ boring. And that was probably why she agreed when Naydi asked her if she wouldn’t mind just taking a little box of stuff for a friend on Vead. In her heart, Jenna knew it had to be illegal. Naydi claimed that it was just that the cost was too much, that she only asked because she knew Jenna was going and Jenna pretended to believe her but she knew. She just … decided that she didn’t care. And when Naydi’s “friend” gave her money, she returned it all to Naydi.

“It’s free, this time,” was all she said. And Naydi grinned and punched her shoulder and said “That’s my girl.”

Of course, it didn’t just stay as favours to Naydi. She got to know more and more people, began to make her own contacts, have her own ideas. Smuggling was a good way to make a lot of extra credits. People would pay for lots of ridiculous things, it wasn’t all dangerous stuff. It was just that people wanted it and didn’t want to pay the Federation taxes. Jenna could understand that. It didn’t bother her.

There were dark sides to it. She met some pretty awful people. She got into some rather terrible places, nearly died more than once. She knew that some of the things she smuggled were not harmless, that the things she had bought into worlds weren’t always good. But she told herself that soon, she’d have enough money for her own ship. When she did, she could fly wherever she wanted, do whatever she wanted. Perhaps she would keep smuggling, perhaps she wouldn’t. Certainly, she’d be able to pick and choose her own cargos. 

She’d be free.

But then she wasn’t. She knew she’d never know how it happened. Maybe somebody betrayed her, maybe some Federation goon just got lucky. But one minute, everything was fine and then she was in a prison cell and she knew that she would never be free again. They’d find her guilty – she _was_ guilty, she could hardly complain. And she’d be in prison for life.

The _London_ was hardly the spaceship she would have picked for her last flight. It was small and dark and vibrated badly. She could have flown it better than the idiot they had on the flight deck. And the company was hardly delightful. 

Well. Vila was rather sweet, in his own slightly ridiculous way. He was safe, she knew, he wouldn’t try it on with her except for playful flirting. And when he adopted Gan, she decided quickly that was another good bet. Gan was strong and solid and clearly had morals. And Nova was just a little boy, quite unworrying.

And then there was Blake.

And it was because of Blake that the _London_ was _not_ her final spaceship.

The _Liberator_ was beautiful. More beautiful than the ships she dreamed of in her childhood, more beautiful than anything she had ever seen in her adulthood. She was large. She handled gracefully, delightfully. She flew faster than Jenna had ever thought she could go. 

It was dangerous. It was frightening. She wasn’t totally sure sometimes that working for Blake was quite the freedom she’d always craved.

But as long as she could fly the _Liberator_ , she had found a type of freedom. And she wouldn’t give it up.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the livejournal comm b7friday


End file.
